How Nanotech Can Help Solve the Fresh Water Crisis

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[PaleGhost]

Time for me to bring up permaculture again! With proper earth works and land management, permaculture can water its crops with minimal irrigation by storing the water that falls onto the soil instead of letting it run off. By slowing and spreading the water, it allows it to penetrate deep into the ground which recharges the water table and aquifers.

I can keep going on about this if anyone is interested.

[edlibey]

The waste product “Brine” you mentioned is just the saltier water remaining behind after the fresh water is removed. Example you have 20 gallons of typical sea water with a salt content of 3.5%. Using reverse osmosis, regular distillation, or the membrane distillation you mentioned; you remove 10 gallons of fresh water. That means you are left with 10 gallons of 7.0% brine solution. It doesn’t matter how you remove the fresh water. You are always left with the increased salinity “brine” solution.

So the new membrane distillation may or may not be more energy efficient but, from the information you provided it definitely doesn’t reduce the brine waste problem.

Of course the easiest way to fix the brine waste problem in a desert desalination plant would be to pump it into a big basin and allow the rest of the water to evaporate. The salt would build up and the world would have a future salt dome. A small amount of the salt could be sold for use as used for rock salt.

[williambunting]

Any new technology that desalinates water safely is going to be an important part of the future. But one thing, desalinating water is not that energy intensive where the water is to be directly use by people. For basic desalination (without extended purification processes) it takes about 3 watt hours per litre to desalinate. Think of that in terms of a household rooftop solar. For people living on boats generating their water for their own use the energy consumption is under 5b watt hours per litre. For me living on a boat I consume about 270 liters per week with an energy cost of 1.35 KWhrs per week. I have 1 kw capacity solar panels as well as a wind generator. Food production on the other hand might be an interesting calculation.

[carlcarter]

25 years ago, I worked in an aerospace group. We designed a desalinationsystem for central California.The design looked at financial, ecological, and future needs for this geographical part of California. The design goal was to produce fresh water and electrical power for central/coastal areas using solar desalination methodology. This every so wise politicians determined that there was no need for such a project. This was and just months before the major drought began which continues even today. Arizona is now thinking about doing just this, but it is getting late. My lead engineer on this retired and died soon after his presenting this plan to the California state water management people. and so his plans have retired as well. Climate Change has become the big money dump for America, but so far no Mitigation Plans seem to be offered. It's time for this generation of engineers and scientists to offe mitigation ideas for consideration using many of the new capabilities already developed. My suggestion is: Congres submit Requests for proposals (RFP's) for water management systems for America. This could also be funded like Elon Musk's SpaceX program via Privately and US Budget appropriations. The economy can't grow if there is no place to go into. Water is the life blood of growth for all states and countries.

[XavierBetoN]

-Important Question
Hi Matt, long time watcher, electrical and nanotechnology engineer here, I was thinking about a design, which is basically a Nuclear Reactor, working between sodium coolant and water coolant principles, say the sea water is cooling the first reactor, the steam emission from the turbine is then can be condensated instead of being released into atmosphere, the leftover steam could produce fresh water for use. Be it with single reactor design, or two-stage, that could revolutionize way we produce our needs. Both energy and desalination could be done in one struct, instead of using electrical power to run the desalination, we could simply use the excess heat from the reactor.
This idea has a lot of space left to develop. I know you can add few interesting things to it and spread the idea better than me.
THANK YOU SO MUCH

[roadboat]

I have lived “off grid” for a number of years on my 44’ sailboat. I use a Spectra de-salinization “watermaker”. It is RO BUT. Uses a recovery engineered pump to greatly reduce the energy costs. I make roughly a gallon of water per 1 amp at 12 volt. I make 8-10 gallons per hour from my small solar panels. As we are conservative on water use, we only need to run it an hr or two a day. That’s around a hundred or two watts per day!! I do not know how this technology scales up but works great for us. Off course this does not eliminate the brine issue. We are a tiny drop in the bucket. As we are usually in open water, not a harbor. A newer more efficient membrane would be wonderful.

[chronosx]

Some 20 years ago I heard for the first time that Israel uses droplet irrigation as a means to save water and even export it. As amazing as this technologies being develop genuinely is, reducing consumption by widespread adoption of technologies with literal decades of use could be just as revolutionary

[TedToal_TedToal]

Re-mining lithium in the Atacama desert, I would think that using the solar mirrors and greenhouse dome to surround the brine water would increase the rate of evaporation and allow the lithium to be obtained faster. At the same time, if there were collectors in the dome that were cool so that water vapor would condense on them and then if it were channeled out of the dome, the same system could produce freshwater as well as lithium.

[vitor]

There are actually tons of ways to deal with brine:
You can mix it with threated sewage to equalize with the local sea water salt level.
You can dump on rivers near where it meets the ocean to it reaches the ocean at the same salinity.
You can pre mix with with ocean water to reduce its concentration.
Spread the output so it has more sea water per liter to equalize with.
You can let the brine dry and use the salt in many applications.
This are just some. There is probably more.

[dans]

Regarding 7:28, RO filtration producing 2 parts brine for ea part of fresh. Seawater is 3.5% salt. 100 lbs seawater contains 3.5 lbs salt. The 2 parts, 67 lbs, then contain the 3.5 lbs salt, a 5.22% salt concentration.
If those 2 parts of 5.22% "brine" are disposed into normal fresh runoff channels, where the 1 part fresh will eventually go, the ocean's salt content will remain the same and not necessarily have harmful high concentration areas.

[allmhuran]

Of course, when we say things like "a hamburger takes 1500L of water to make", it's not like that water is consumed and disappears from the cycle. You irrigate land, the plants suck it up, and return it to the atmosphere via transpiration, and eventually it gets dumped again as rain. More water "consumption" = more rain. In some sense it doesn't matter how much water you "use" this way, because it's going to come back to you, and eventually the system reaches an equilibrium where the water being "consumed" and the rate at which it is being returned as rain will be the same.

The issue is where and when that rain falls. It doesn't come back instantly, and it doesn't come back in the same place as it was consumed. And of course climate change runs the risk of significantly changing the where and the when. If you "use" the water in a parched area, and it gets returned in an area that already floods regularly, everything gets worse.

[georgepretnick]

C"mon Matt, yes it takes a lot of water to grow alfalfa and other crops, but unless ALL crops were grow in Southern California, most of that water falls out of the sky. It does here. Sometimes too much. It's only a problem in the Desert Southwest. The region just can't support that amount of population and agriculture.
I hope your new tech will supply cheap clean water to the DSW and the rest of the world.

[paul]

They found that the wettest years in the SW always occur after the dry lake bed of Laguna Salgada floods with gulf seawater. Its considered one of the best spots in the world for natural evaporation. Theres a plan to connect The Salton Sea to the Gulf through Laguna Salgada, and its pretty brilliant.

[obsoletepowercorrupts]

Some of the sodium-chloride salt can be sealed into big panels encased in strengthened glass _(by chemical tempering, such as with doping the glass with potassium for the ions, and other elements instead)_ and so this forms a reasonably strong building material _(for some limited purposes)_ which can shade ground _(and sometimes be used in the sea)._ That "salt-glass" building material _(e.g. cuboidal or interlocking shapes instead)_ can shade the ground of land _(including deserts)_ so as to lower the ground's temperature and increase the probably of rain on account of the fact that the cooler surface wil mean the rain is less likely to evaporate before hitting the surface. Canals can be made (partly) from lining made from such building-material so as to move saltwater. The salt does not react with the brine and that is because it is encased in glass _(chemically-tempered glass, as has been mentioned here)._ The colour of the glass can also be customised via doping so as to change the wavelength of the light reflecting or absorbed via the energy gap _(effective nuclear charge), _ and there are various usage scenarios for that such as how plants react differently to different colour light or intensity. Heat can also be stored thusly as a form of "battery" of energy _(photons as heat)._ This comment is to help.
My comment has no hate in it and I do no harm. I am not appalled or afraid, boasting or envying or complaining... Just saying. Psalms23: Giving thanks and praise to the Lord and peace and love.

[davemould]

Sewerage treatment plants discharge water that is perfectly good enough for irrigation. In some parts of the World there are two water supplies - one is drinking water, and the other is treated sewerage water used for watering gardens and fields, and can also be used for washing cars etc. The treated sewerage water is also safe enough to drink (I have done so on several occasions by drinking from a garden tap (faucet) that I was unaware was connected to the treated sewerage supply).

[MrSwac]

Hi there, long fan of the channel.
On the 1kg Meat = 510L of Water, it's true but 94% of cow's water consumption comes from rainwater.
If you contrast this with crop irrigation that takes around 70% of the world’s freshwater it paints a different picture.
The worst offender is rice with around 4, 000 - 5, 000 litres of water per kg

[howlingdakota]

Vertical farming supposedly uses up to 97% less water too. Crops that can be grown using this method should be done so the farming land that would have been used for these crops can be used for a better purpose and rivers can flow again without being drained or deviated.

[andrews]

The solar desalination dome sounds like a great solution for coastal areas, but it would also require a lot of energy for the drinking water to get pumped to where it's needed. Would it be viable to double dip and use the energy from the solar panels to pump water into the desalination dome? As for the resulting brine water, pump it to a reservoir to let the water evaporate. Send the leftover salt to snowy places that consume salt by the ton for snow removal.

[michaeldavis]

Based on several YouTube videos that I’ve seen on Kuwait (the #2 Country that is featured on that chart you showed on the water scarcity chart thing), they supposedly deal with incredibly hot heat (we’re talking possibly around 130F-160+F) and only 10 days of rainfall. They had to create desalination plants for their water issue, so that they could get clean drinking water from their own oceans.

To address the brine issue (although I have no idea if Kuwait still dumps brine back into their own oceans or not), apparently what they do with the brine is that they load it into planes that take up and release that salt near clouds, so that they cause extra rainfall (also known as cloud seeding) and that rain falls near one of their streams so that they could have extra clean drinking water.

What I also find incredibly interesting about Kuwait is that they decided to create water channels all throughout their land so that everyone residing there could basically have their own beach.

[Geisenyarder]

Another up and coming tech I learned about recently is capacitive deionization. It uses electrostatic charges to remove ions from water, is more energy efficient than reverse osmosis, produces less brine byproduct which would make it more economical to concentrate into a solid form to be disposed of or applied to some process which requires salts.